This Week in Digital…

Joseph Fitzpatrick

March 14th 2014

This week in digital

Happy birthday to the World Wide Web

The internet turned 25-years-old on Wednesday and its inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (pictured), was ubiquitous in the media talking about his creation. Talking about how he ended up on the three Ws,Berners-Lee told the BBC: “There were all kinds of names at the start: the Mine of Information, which would have been MOI; or TIM, The Information Mine.

“The word ‘World’ was global, which was important. And ‘Web’? Mathematically it’s a web and gives the “impression that you can connect anything to anything.

“WWW” didn’t trip off the tongue for people in other countries but it was an acronym no-one else had used.”

Flappy Bird in comeback shocker

Retiring in order to have a comeback is one of the oldest publicity tricks in the book and lo and behold app game Flappy Bird appears to be following this tried and tested trajectory. Yanked mercifully from the App Store and Google Play at the height of its fame Flappy Bird is now set to return according to creator Dong Nguyen.

GAME newsjack Alan Pardew

Newcastle manager Alan Pardew directed a head-butt at an opposition player a few weeks back for which he was duly handed a seven-match suspension by the Football Association this week (three as a stadium ban). The Newcastle branch of GAME took this opportunity to offer Pardew a special version of Football Manager, complete with free anger management session.

Why does it always rain on me?

Cats, finger-biting babies, goats playing on metal are all proven viral hits but now researchers at the University of California, Yale and Facebook have discovered that moods can also go viral. The study looked at how social updates differed in different weather conditions: happy when sunny, sad when rainy etc.

In layman terms sad posts prompt more of the same among a users friends, and vice-versa for happy posts.

And finally…

The Conservative party have spent thousands on Facebook ads in an attempt to boost prime minister David Camerons popularity – an effort it seems that was worthwhile with the number of likes for his official page doubling in the last month. While, Instagram has been reported to have signed a $100m deal with Omnicom that will see the social network show ads for the latters clients.